Termite Eradication: A search for the Holy Grail

TELL US ABOUT THE TERMITE PROBLEM IN ENDEAVOR, WISCONSIN.

Termites were discovered in Endeavor, Wisconsin in the 1980s.

They were actually found in the fire station, which was one of the main buildings in the downtown part of the city.

The fire station eventually had to be torn down from the amount of damage that there was in the structure.

In the 1990s they actually had tried a small eradication project, Dow Agra sciences did.

But they didn't end up staying long enough to fix the problem.


WHAT APPROACH DID YOU TAKE AGAINST THE INFESTATION?

We started in 2006.

We put out 200 commercial baiting stations all around the perimeter of the village.

We also added some additional stations in the downtown area where we knew there was pretty high numbers of termites.

For the first year we just tried to outline the extent of the colony in the village, basically.

In the following years, we ended up putting more stations where we knew there were higher pockets of termites.

After maybe a year, year-and-a-half or two of that, we realized that we needed to do something to supplement the baiting and we started dusting then.


DESCRIBE YOUR METHOD FOR TRAP, TREAT & RELEASE.

Dusting basically entails collecting the individual termites in cardboard baits, which we have a wooden frame that is full of just old cardboard, basically.

The termites crawl in there and we knock them out of there and dust them with whatever insecticide that we're testing.

The method is called trap, treat and release.

It was actually done previously by Glenn Esenther, he was an emeritus entomologist from FPL, and also a guy from Ontario, Canada, Tim Myles.

He's also done some work with trap, treat and release.

The dust gets put on the individual termites' bodies and when they go back, they're re-released into the colony and the termites have this behavior where they actually groom each other.

That's how the insecticide gets transferred in the colony.

The dust that we use is an experimental termiticide that was actually patented between FPL and ARS.


WHAT WERE THE RESULTS OF YOUR RESEARCH?

We started treatment in 2006 and by 2009 we actually saw no more termite activity in the village.

We were actually just there recently, this past week, and talked to people around town and they know exactly what to look for and no one has seen further termite activity.

So, the results were really promising.

So, one of the main reasons that I think we were so successful in this project is that we had involvement from so many different parties.

We had help from the UW entomology department, we had help from a pest-control operator, the city board of Endeavor was really, really important in helping us find where the termites were and giving us access to a lot of properties and things like that.

And so I think that if it wasn't for that collaboration we wouldn't have had so much luck.